The destruction of home during an active conflict is much more than the physical destruction. It is an act to marginalise and destroy people – an act rooted in power politics.

Dr Ammar Azzouz and Fahad Zuberi are exploring the concept of “Domicide” through their research from Syria and India respectively. Both speakers are architects by training and their work explores how violence is used as a tool of repression and control.

About the speakers:

Dr Ammar Azzouz is a British Academy Research Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment and based at Somerville College. He is the Principal Investigator of Slow Violence and the City, a research project that examines the impact of violence on the built environment at the time of war and peace. Azzouz’s first book, “Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria” (Bloomsbury, 2023), offers fresh insights into the role of the architects during time of war.

Fahad Zuberi is the Indira Gandhi-Radhakrishnan Scholar at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development. He is reading for the MSc in Modern South Asian Studies and his work focuses on the intersection of architecture and violence, particularly in South Asian contexts. Fahad studied B. Arch at Aligarh Muslim University (2010-15), an M. Arch HTC (2017-19) at CEPT University, Ahmedabad before coming to Oxford.